Using a digital mapping service, adorned with location markers (or pins), is known. Location markers are often used by online services such as Google Maps to illustrate a map with pins that indicate locations of importance to users, such as locations of shops and other points of interest. Other digital mapping services also allow the display and selection of a region of a map, such as a suburb or locality within a city; to display information about the selected regions. Users, however, have been constrained to selecting a single location at a time (by selecting a pin), or by selecting a whole region at a time (and thus any pins within).
Unfortunately, existing methods of allowing the selection of location markers that are located in adjacent regions have often not considered the difficulties in performing these selections when there is a high density of location markers that are near the boundary between regions. Existing methods typically require the users to zoom in until it is clear to which region a location marker belongs and the user may then select their desired location marker. This results in a negative user experience when the user would like to select the location markers near the boundary of a region in a continuous selection mode, as the user needs to zoom-in to select. However, the user then cannot see everything and needs to zoom-out or pan to move the map to a next part of the region in which the user wishes to select location markers.
Unfortunately, the existing methods of allowing the selection of location markers that are located in abutting regions do not support an easy method of extending the number of adjacent regions from which a location marker may be selected. One existing method allows the user to select multiple regions on an image and then to limit image operations to the selected regions. However, the selection of the multiple regions is manual and tedious since the user has to select an additional region where location markers may be selected.
In another one existing method, a region of interest is considered after an initial location marker is selected. Other location markers within the region of interest are then ordered into a sequence of location markers that are selected as a selection cursor moves in a direction. In such an arrangement, a dense location marker case is considered by creating a sequence of the location markers. However, the selection of location markers is limited to within items in a single region. Further, an additional region is still not able to be easily considered, and location markers near a boundary of the region are not able to be selected.